You 2.0: The Wisdom of Stoicism

What does it mean to be stoic? Many of us assume it means you have a stiff upper lip, or that you suppress your emotions. That's what Massimo Pigliucci thought — until he started to peruse a book called Meditations. It was written nearly two thousand years ago by the Roman Emperor Marcus Aurelius. But Massimo, now a philosopher, says Meditations, and Stoic philosophy more broadly, offer wisdom that continues to speak to our lives. This week, we explore Stoic ideas and the lessons they hold for what it means to live well.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Shankar Vedantam?

  This is Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedantam. To be human, to be alive, is to be vulnerable to sadness and suffering.

• 0:10Shankar Vedantam?

  For centuries, artists, writers, and thinkers have tried to capture what this feels like. The author William Styron once said, "The gray drizzle of horror induced by depression takes on the quality of physical pain." But it is not an immediately identifiable pain like that of a broken limb.

• 0:34Shankar Vedantam?

  It may be more accurate to say that despair comes to resemble the diabolical discomfort of being imprisoned in a fiercely overheated room.

• 0:44Shankar Vedantam?

  And because no breeze stirs this cauldron, because there is no escape from this smothering confinement, it is entirely natural that the victim begins to think ceaselessly of oblivion.

• 1:02Shankar Vedantam?

  Sometimes, our suffering is connected to what we see in the world. During the Civil War, President Abraham Lincoln, who was already prone to depression, was often consumed by the horrors of the war. His secretary, John Hay, would note that "He would sit for hours staring vacantly out the window, his face displaying the deepest sorrow imaginable."

• 1:27Shankar Vedantam?

  But as long as humans have been suffering, humans have also been trying to find paths out of suffering. Philosophers, scientists, and spiritual leaders have offered many ideas on how to live a life of contentment.

• 1:44Shankar Vedantam?

  Today on the show, we explore the ideas of an unusual philosopher-king who lived some 19 centuries ago. There's a reason his meditations about a life worth living have survived nearly 2,000 years.

• 2:00Shankar Vedantam?

  Ancient ideas to help us find a way out of modern despondencies. This week on Hidden Brain.

• 2:22Shankar Vedantam?

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• 3:06Shankar Vedantam?

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• 3:51Shankar Vedantam?

  Most of us have been there. Low points in our life when we look around and realize that something needs to change. What we do in these moments can spell the difference between a life of well-being or a life of despair.

• 4:05Shankar Vedantam?

  At the City College of New York, philosopher Massimo Pigliucci has personal experience with such moments in his own life. Massimo Pigliucci, welcome to Hidden Brain.

• 4:15Speaker 01

  It's a pleasure to be here. Thanks for having me.

• 4:18Shankar Vedantam?

  Massimo, your world fell apart when you turned 40. Where were you living at the time?

• 4:24Speaker 01

  I was in Knoxville, Tennessee, the buckle of the Bible Belt, as they call it.

• 4:30Shankar Vedantam?

  And what was going on in your life?

• 4:32Speaker 01

  I had started my academic career at the University of Tennessee. I was a biologist at the time, not a philosopher. And I was being treated very well by the university there. But at the same time, there were a couple of things that were problematic. Number one, the local culture was difficult for me to live in. I was a professor of evolutionary biology. My students, some of them actually told me that I was probably going to go to hell. So it's like, you know, that's challenging. But the more important bit was that I had a daughter from a previous relationship, and she was living on the East Coast in Connecticut. So I always wanted to move back into that area. And that is problematic for somebody who is a full professor with tenure,

• 5:16Speaker 01

  because there are very few positions available, especially in the East Coast, because everybody wants to go there. And typically, universities hire junior faculty, not senior professionals. So that was a problem.

• 5:37Shankar Vedantam?

  Massimo tried to address the situation by applying for jobs on the East Coast. As luck would have it, he landed a position with Stony Brook University on Long Island. But even as it seemed like a solution was at hand for one challenge, others cropped up. Massimo and his wife started having problems in their marriage. Instead of moving together to Long Island, they decided to get a divorce.

• 6:03Shankar Vedantam?

  And then, Massimo's father, who lived thousands of miles away, was diagnosed with cancer.

• 6:10Speaker 01

  So my father had been hit by multiple types of cancer. He was a big smoker. So at that point, my mother, his ex-wife, made a comment. He said, "Leherba cativa non more mai", which is Italian for "the bad weeds never die".

• 6:28Speaker 01

  She meant it as a joke, but it was, you know...

• 6:34Speaker 01

  And then all of a sudden, things took a turn for the worse and it killed him in a matter of weeks. In fact, it was so fast that I did not have the time to really do anything. You know, I was on my way, literally on my way to the airport to get on the plane, to get to Rome and go see him. And my brother called me saying, you know, Dad, just that. I literally broke down crying on the highway. I had to pull over. So I was able to get to his funeral, but not, but not being there in the last few moments. So at this point, picture this. In a span of a few months, I got hit with this news that apparently I'm going to be divorced. My father dies.

• 7:19Speaker 01

  And in the meantime, of course, I had accepted the position at Stony Brook, which meant that I had a new job, I had to move across the country, and I had to find a new house. Now, any psychologist worth his salt would tell you that one or two of those things is pretty stressful. Four or five of them simultaneously, that's a lot.

• 7:47Shankar Vedantam?

  So during this time of upheaval in your life, you found consolation and guidance in an unexpected source. It was a book you had encountered many years earlier in college, but rereading it this time, you felt like it was speaking directly to you. What was this book, Massimo?

• 8:02Speaker 01

  The book was The Meditations by Marcus Aurelius, which is a Stoic book. And that's interesting in itself because the first time that I came across Marcus Aurelius, I thought Stoics is, ah, come on, who wants to live a life like a Stoic? I mean, aren't these the kind of people that go around with a stiff upper lip and suppressing emotions, right? So kind of like Mr. Spock from Star Trek.

• 8:27Speaker 01

  So when I came across Marcus again, I thought, hmm, I don't know about this thing. And then I opened the Meditations. And one of the first phrases, so the Meditation is not the kind of book that you necessarily read cover to cover. Because it is, it was a personal philosophical diary or journal of the emperor. So it was not in fact meant for publication. So when I opened it up at random, one of the first few sentences that I found is in one of the later books, and it said, something like, "You don't like the cucumber because it's bitter. Well, don't eat it. Why do you have to go on and complain about the fact that there are bitter cucumbers in the world?"

• 9:08Speaker 01

  That struck me as very powerful and very insightful. We tend to complain all the time about the fact that things don't go our way, that the world is not the way we would like it to be. And those complaints don't do anything practical, they're not actionable. So complaining about it becomes simply a way to wallow in your self pity, or to fuel your own dissatisfaction with the world, which makes the thing worse. So now you have both an external situation, some aspect of the world that you don't like, and you are making yourself inwardly worse by complaining about it in a way that it gets frustrating because you can't do anything about it.

• 9:53Speaker 01

  So I went back to that phrase, it says, "Okay, there are bitter cucumbers in the world, that's a fact, right? I do not have the power to eliminate bitter cucumbers from the world. I do have the power to refuse to eat them." And that's it. Marcus is absolutely right. I don't need the additional step of complaining and wallowing in this fact that the world is so unfair because there's bitter cucumbers.

• 10:21Speaker 01

  That was the beginning, or one of the beginnings, because I also got, pretty much at the same time, another stunning phrase from Epictetus, who was one of the inspirations to Marcus, so the two are very closely related. Epictetus was another interesting guy. You know, Marcus Eras was an emperor, so literally the most powerful person in the Mediterranean world at the time. Epictetus was at the opposite extreme. He was a slave. He started out life as a slave. He was actually eventually freed and he became actually one of the most well-known and respected teachers in the Mediterranean area at the beginning of the second century. So he was a very... He had a completely different sort of life trajectory. And yet, the ideas, the Stoic ideas, resonated a panther with both of these people

• 11:06Speaker 01

  and both of them became major conduits for later generations. And one of the things that Epictetus says at the beginning of the discourses is, "So you want to make money?" He's talking to some of his friends. "You want to make money or you want me to make money so that I can help you? Well, that's all fine. But what am I going to do with that money? The money itself isn't going to tell me. What's going to tell me is my faculty of judgment." And Epictetus uses this to make the general Stoic point that so-called externals, things like money or health even, or reputation,

• 11:46Speaker 01

  are not the fundamental thing. They're not crucial because it all depends on how you use them. You can be very rich and do a lot of damage. Or you may be very poor and actually use your resources very wisely. To Epictetus and Marcus, it's not fame or money or wealth or whatever it is per se. It's how you use them that makes a difference. And that struck me as another fundamental insight from Stoicism that, "Why are you now focusing on improving your decision-making ability and you keep focusing instead on, more or less mindlessly, follow what society at large tells you? You're trying to become more wealthy, more famous and so on and so forth." Hold on. What are you going to do with all that stuff once you have it?

• 12:39Shankar Vedantam?

  When we come back, how the ideas of Marcus Aurelius can help us steer a course through the challenges of modern life. You're listening to Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedantam.

• 12:58Shankar Vedantam?

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• 13:43Shankar Vedantam?

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• 14:25Shankar Vedantam?

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• 14:55Shankar Vedantam?

  This is Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedantam. Massimo Pigliucci is a philosopher at the City College of New York. At a low point in his life, he rediscovered a 1,900-year-old set of personal reflections written by the Roman emperor Marcus Aurelius. It is widely known today by the simplest of titles: Meditations. Massimo, describe who Marcus Aurelius was and the kind of world in which he operated.

• 15:22Speaker 01

  So he was one of the so-called "five good emperors." Marcus had a difficult time as an emperor. He did not want to be an emperor. He was really not that interested. In the Meditations, at some point, he says, "You can live a good life anywhere. If you have to be in a palace, then you can have a good life even in a palace," which tells you that he wasn't exactly thrilled. And he did not have an easy reign, unlike the others, especially his predecessor, Antoninus Pius. Because during Marcus's reign, a number of things happened. Two frontier wars. There was an attack on the frontiers of the empire in the east by the Parthians and from the north, from a number of German tribes, chiefly the Marko Mani.

• 16:06Speaker 01

  He had to deal with an internal rebellion by one of his lieutenants, who declared himself emperor. Rome was hit by a devastating flood of the Tiber River that destroyed half of the city. A huge earthquake demolished the city of Smyrna in modern western Turkey, and the emperor also had to deal with that. So he had his hands full. And what he did throughout was to do his best in order to apply his Stoic philosophy to the situation. So here's a case where we literally have an emperor philosopher, or a philosopher-king, as Plato would put it. We have somebody who is not only interested in philosophy for its own sake, but he actually

• 16:48Speaker 01

  is determined to use philosophy as a way of life and therefore as a framework to make decisions, both personal and political. And that really did make a difference. Arguably, that's one of the things that made him a great emperor.

• 17:11Shankar Vedantam?

  So the Stoics basically talk about a regular part of life, which is a practice known as evening meditation. What is this, Massimo, and how is it conducted?

• 17:23Speaker 01

  You can think of the entire meditations as a series of evening meditations, but the exercise is also described briefly in Epictetus and more length in Seneca. Basically, it consists in this: before you go to bed, you take a little bit of time, not a lot, five, 10 minutes maybe.

• 17:44Speaker 01

  You get into a quiet corner of both your house and your mind, and then you go and reflect on salient events that happened during the day, asking yourself how you reacted, how you handled those things. Seneca specifically, for instance, says, you know, you should go over and say, what have I learned today? How am I improved myself? In what way am I better? Epictetus is even more specific. It says that we need to ask ourselves three questions: what did I do wrong? What did I do right? And what could I do better the next time that something like that happens? It has very good empirical backing from modern science. It really does work. It is a kind of self-analysis.

• 18:28Speaker 01

  Now, there is a limitation in doing self-analysis, which is, as especially modern psychologists have demonstrated, you know, human beings are very good at rationalizing. So you can write down things and then you can, you can make up all sorts of excuses about why you did certain things or you didn't do other things. But the Stoics were aware of that, which is why they said, well, you need to do the self-analysis, you need to do the self-examination, but you also need some help. And there are two major sources of help for the Stoics.

• 18:58Speaker 01

  One is to imagine a role model. So imagine that you're actually talking to somebody. If you notice, the meditation is written in the second person. It's not "I did this," but "you did this." As if Marcus were writing to a friend or to somebody else who was listening, and he was giving advice to that person.

• 19:18Shankar Vedantam?

  Even though he was talking about himself?

• 19:20Speaker 01

  Even though he was talking about himself. And again, that is very good. I was just reading an article the other day in psychological literature. There is pretty good evidence that this technique helps achieving an emotional detachment, to some extent, from your own actions, and therefore engaging more analytically, more critically with what you've done. And the other external help is talking to a friend. Literally talking to a friend, right? And the Stoics thought that friends, real friends, are so-called friends of virtue. The kind of friends that are okay telling you that you're doing something wrong if they do think that you're doing something wrong. And you don't need a lot of them,

• 20:04Speaker 01

  but it's important to have at least one, to have that kind of person that you can go and have a drink and say, "You know, I got this issue. What do you think?"

• 20:23Shankar Vedantam?

  So I understand that these evening meditations have now become a regular part of your life, Massimo?

• 20:28Speaker 01

  Yeah, I've been doing it for years. And if you know that there is a recurring issue, let's say anger, for instance, or frustration, or whatever it is, then you just say, "Okay, how was I doing five years ago with this?" Or, "What kind of themes was I preoccupied with? What kind of issues were bothering me 10 years ago as opposed to now?" And so it becomes also a way to keep track of progress. "Am I doing better on this thing? Is it something that 10 years ago was bothering me a lot, and now it's not because I've actually made progress? And if not, then perhaps that's one thing that I need to focus on that I was not sufficiently aware of."

• 21:08Shankar Vedantam?

  So before you became a student of Marcus Aurelius and Stoic philosophy, Massimo, you wrestled with your feelings about a particular aspect of your physique. What was it that bothered you?

• 21:20Speaker 01

  I've always been a little bit overweight since I was a kid, and in fact arguably still am. And so I struggle with that because and initially I struggled with that in an unhealthy way, I would say, which is kind of typical because you have pressure from your peers, even my own parents. My parents brought me to a dietitian when I was in middle school or something like that, which probably was way of an overreaction because the problem certainly was not was not that dramatic. But once you get into, you observe the notion from others, including the people who love you, that there is an issue, that there is a problem, that you need really to work on it, then it becomes, it easily becomes an obsession and therefore not healthy. So I struggle with that on and off, you know,

• 22:05Speaker 01

  so self-image. Sometimes it got me into trouble in terms of relationships. I just wouldn't know how to handle or wouldn't know how to pursue necessarily a friendship or a relationship because of my body image problem.

• 22:21Shankar Vedantam?

  So Marcus Aurelius has some insight to contribute here. He says that it's important to respect what he calls the dichotomy of control. What is this idea, Massimo?

• 22:30Speaker 01

  This is a fundamental Stoic idea. In fact, the phrase dichotomy of control is actually modern. The ancients themselves, Epictetus, who was Marcus Aurelius's influence, one of the major influences on Marcus, he calls it the fundamental rule, which right there tells you, you know, it's important. So the fundamental rule says that some things are up to us and other things are not up to us. And then it gives you the advice of, look, if there is in fact this distinction, you need to focus on the stuff that is up to you because that's where your agency is actually efficacious. That's where you can make a difference. And you need to develop a mindful, purposeful attitude of acceptance and equanimity toward the kinds of things that are not up to you.

• 23:15Speaker 01

  This is a notion that comes up in a number of other cultures, it's not just Stoic. It comes out in Judaism, ancient Judaism, ancient Buddhism, modern Christianity, the serenity prayer, for instance, that it's early 20th century. Christian prayer used in meetings of 12-step organizations like Alcoholic Anonymous essentially does the same thing. It asks God, in this case, to give you the wisdom to figure out what it is you can change, what you cannot, the courage to change what you can, and the serenity to accept what you cannot. Now, Epictetus and Marcus say that what is up to us are essentially your judgments,

• 23:58Speaker 01

  your assessment of a situation and how to deal with it. That's all. Your response to the world, in other words. Your response to the world. What is not up to us is pretty much everything else. Which is counterintuitive, right? Because you say, "Wait a minute." So Epictetus and Marcus both list a series of these things that are not up to us, and they start with health. So they say, "Health, wealth, reputation, career, relationships, and all that." It's like, "Health? What do you mean health is not up to me? Of course." Now, we were talking about my body image problems. What do you mean my health is not up to me? Of course it is. I can do all certain things about my health, right? I can eat a good diet, you know, I can go and exercise, I can go to the doctor on a

• 24:42Speaker 01

  regular basis and practice preventive medicine, I can do all those. But then you think about it and say, "Ah, but wait a minute. Those are all judgments or decisions to act or not to act. What I don't control, what is not up to me, is the outcomes." Sure, I can eat healthy, I can go to the gym, which I do, largely. And I go regularly to the doctor. Nevertheless, there are a lot of other factors that contribute to the outcome, to the actual health, that are not under my control. I can make all the efforts I want, but to some extent, I am limited by my own genetics and my own early upbringing. We know that both the genetics and early development, even intrauterine development, before you're born, and certainly

• 25:26Speaker 01

  the first few months of development. Those are crucial to determine, you know, how you're going to respond long term to certain things. And I had no control over those. I can't rearrange my genes. I didn't pick my genes and so on and so forth. So the general idea then becomes that, look, on the one hand, you accept from the get go the notion that you do not have full control over anything, anything that is external, none of those things. And you need to be okay with it because what are your choices? There's only two choices. You're either okay with it or you throw a tantrum. Throwing a tantrum doesn't help. It's the kind of thing that children do because they're not emotionally mature. An adult is not supposed to do that sort of stuff. Also, throwing a tantrum not only doesn't help, but actually gets in the way

• 26:11Speaker 01

  because now you're adding the actual injury from the external to an internal imposed injury. The fact that now you feel bad because you've lost control, you're anxious and so on and so forth. So you need to focus on what actually you can do, which is empowering because the idea is not that you can't do anything about anything. You can do quite a bit. It's just that you need to be very clear on the limits and what exactly it is that you can and cannot do. And once you are clear on that, your interventions become much more efficacious and therefore you feel better. And broadly speaking, you get better outcomes.

• 27:00Shankar Vedantam?

  So Marcus himself followed this advice when a terrible plague struck his part of the world. What happened during this time in the Roman Empire, Massimo, and how did Marcus respond to it?

• 27:10Speaker 01

  Yeah, Marcus's reign was made very difficult by a number of issues. One of them is the Antonine Plague, which was the worst plague to hit antiquity. It killed close to 5 million people, and it was probably caused by measles brought back by the legions that were fighting on the east side of the empire. He also had to deal with natural disasters, a major flood of the Tiber that devastated Rome, a major earthquake that raised Smyrna in modern western Turkey. So he had a lot of issues to deal with. Every time, he says to himself, "Okay, what here is up to me and what is not up to me?"

• 27:50Speaker 01

  For instance, in the case of the plague, the resources of the empire were already depleted by the war against the Spartans. So, you know, even though the Roman Empire was rich, there is a limit, obviously. And so what Marcus thought one of the things that was up to him was to actually sell a lot of the imperial treasury and jewels. So he essentially did auctions where he sold out a bunch of stuff that he thought, "I don't need this. This is not making my life better, but it has the potential to help with the relief effort." And so that's what he did, right? But he was not expecting the plague to just go away.

• 28:34Speaker 01

  He said, "We don't understand what a plague is in the first place. We don't know what causes this thing. We just have to ride it out. We just have to do our best in order to deal with it, and then it will go away at some point by itself." So this was a situation where Marcus, you know, wrote in his journal something along the lines of, "What can you do here? Where can you make a difference?" And just as importantly, he kept repeating to himself that...

• 29:05Speaker 01

  In those areas where he couldn't do anything, it was okay. He had to accept that. This was not something that you want to lose your sleep over because A, it doesn't help. And B, if you lose your sleep over it, then you're actually going to be less efficacious in the kind of things you actually can't do.

• 29:33Shankar Vedantam?

  Has this changed the way that you think about your own body image, Massimo?

• 29:38Speaker 01

  It has. I am far less bothered by the issue these days. I focus on what is under my control. So when I go out for dinner, I try to stay away from things that I know are not good for me, minimize the damage, as my wife and I call it. And then when I'm home, you know, we have more control, of course, over what we eat. As I said, I go and exercise on a regular basis and I go to the doctor and, you know, that's it. But, you know, during the pandemic, for instance, I was reminded one more time that Epictetus and Marcus are right. Because one day,

• 30:16Speaker 01

  I suddenly collapsed the floor and was brought to the emergency room.

• 30:22Speaker 01

  I had absolutely no control over my body, nothing. Turns out to be a relatively minor thing. It was a slipped disc. And I recovered very quickly and, you know, thanked Zeus for painkillers and stuff like that. But that was an instant reminder that, you know, although now it's been years that you exercise, you eat healthy, you know, all that sort of stuff, suddenly you wake up in the morning, you're about to go out and you collapse on the floor with the very intense feeling that you have no control over your body. It's like, okay. What would Epictetus or Marcus have said at this point? Well, they would say, okay, you just run into one of those externals that is not up to you. The only thing you can do is to accept it and see what you can do about it

• 31:07Speaker 01

  in order to recover, to handle the situation, et cetera.

• 31:11Shankar Vedantam?

  I understand that Marcus Aurelius talks at length about the urgency of embracing the present moment since none of us ever know how many of those moments we have left. Talk about this idea, Massimo.

• 31:23Speaker 01

  That's right. When I was young, as a lot of young people, you kind of think that you're immortal. And that's, of course, not true, right? I mean, I have looked up my actuarial statistics, so to speak, sometime recently, and it turns out that for somebody my age and my ethnic background living in New York, you know, there is a certain life expectancy. And I looked it up and said, oh, okay. So statistically speaking, I have, you know, a couple more decades. But that's only statistically speaking. Of course, I could die today. I could cross the street and a car could hit me, and that's the end of it. Or again, I could contract a little disease,

• 32:07Speaker 01

  and I could die. So there is all sorts of stuff that can happen in any time in somebody's life, right? Whether you're young, middle-aged, late, etc., etc. And what the Stoics do is they bring that to the forefront of their way of looking at life. Seneca and then Marcus constantly say to themselves, "Act as if this was the last day of your life." Or, if you want to put it more positively, you get up in the morning and you realize that you have one more day. Yay, celebrate that day, because you don't know if you're gonna have a second one, and so on and so forth. Now, this may sound kind of depressing and, you know, morbid and all that sort of stuff,

• 32:52Speaker 01

  but in fact, they're getting at something fundamental here. The notion that what makes our life meaningful is precisely the fact that it's finite. If we actually live forever, if you got to do the same things over and over and over, ad infinitum, nothing will matter, because you always have a remote control and you can rewind and redo it over. And so it would lose meaning. The reality is, by focusing, by reminding yourself that time is in fact finite, and not only that, but that you don't know how much you have left, then you need to redouble your efforts to spend the time that you have in a way that it's meaningful, joyous,

• 33:37Speaker 01

  you know, it's the way you really want to spend your life. Think about it this way. So you're on a trip somewhere, let's say, near the national parks out west, and you have a car... Where the the gauge for the for the gas is broken. You don't know how much gas you have. You can estimate. You can say, well, I I started out with a full tank, you know, three days ago. So perhaps it's around here, but you don't know for sure. Now, at that point, you need to make very careful decisions about where you're going. You can't just take all sorts of detours for all sorts of reasons or for no reason at all, because you might get stuck in the middle of nowhere. You might not get to do what you actually want to do.

• 34:26Shankar Vedantam?

  This point that Marcus Aurelius is making was driven home for you, Massimo, when an episode of brain fog sent you to the hospital, because it's not just the amount of time we have left, but also the amount of good time that we have left.

• 34:40Speaker 01

  Yeah, it was a very disturbing episode, which thankfully has not repeated itself. Basically, I was there trying to write an email to my students and all of a sudden I realized that I my my fingers were hitting the keyboard, but I wasn't writing what I what I thought I was writing. I was in fact, I did not know what I was writing. I called my wife and I said, you know, I think there's something wrong here. And we went immediately to the to the emergency room. They couldn't find anything wrong. Neither neither cardiologists nor neurologists could find anything wrong. But nevertheless, it had happened. And so that was a wake up call that there is also your mind that is not up to you. Right? So one of the things that the Stoics insisted, as we said,

• 35:24Speaker 01

  was that your decision making, your your ability to make sound decisions, that's up to you. But even they understood that that's only provisional on the fact that your mind works more or less normally. At some point, it might not, right?

• 35:39Shankar Vedantam?

  So take me back to the hospital when you went there with this thing of brain fog. What what happened in the hospital? And when and how did you start to think about the Stoics? And what was happening to you at that time?

• 35:49Speaker 01

  So they put me in an emergency room, which means it was somewhat crowded. You know, there was no privacy on it. But I did have my iPad and I did have a charger. And the first thing I did was to open Meditations and Discourses and the Letters of Seneca and remind myself of, you know, what is it that these people are telling me that is so important to me, that is so meaningful to me. Right now, I'm going through a crisis that where I clearly have very little control. I don't, there's not much I can do here, right? I'm in an emergency room at the mercy of both whatever is happening to my body and, you know, whatever the doctors and the nurses decide. There was the anxiety, of course, of not knowing what had happened and maybe a doctor might show up

• 36:35Speaker 01

  either the same day or a week later and tell me, you know what? You got a, I don't know, brain tumor or something like that, right? That was certainly a life possibility. But I decided to do two things about it. Number one, mostly cast that thought aside because, well, I don't know. And until I know, there is nothing I can do about it. And secondly, from time to time, I again pick up my tablet and open my journal and I started doing what the Stoics refer to as a premeditatio malorum, which means it's Latin for thinking about bad stuff happening in the future. The notion is to do it in the way in which Marcus was doing the Meditations analytically,

• 37:18Speaker 01

  detaching yourself, writing to yourself in the second person. And so I wrote to myself in the second person. Okay, so there is a chance that there is something wrong here, either with your heart or your, or your brain.

• 37:31Speaker 01

  So what are you going to do about it? How are you going to deal with this situation, right? If the situation, assuming that the situation is, you know, one of the worst-case scenarios,

• 37:41Speaker 01

  are you ready to handle it? And what are you going to do in terms of handling it, right? Well, one of the first things you're going to do is to figure out as much as possible what in fact it is, so listen to your doctors and what they're saying. Then get a good, reasonable estimate of what might happen in the near future, how long that future might be, and then you redirect, you reorganize your life accordingly. You make the best use possible of that time.

• 38:13Shankar Vedantam?

  When we come back, more ideas about what it means to live a good life. You're listening to Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedantam.

• 38:30Shankar Vedantam?

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• 39:15Shankar Vedantam?

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• 39:34Speaker 02

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• 40:02Shankar Vedantam?

  This is Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedantam. Do you have follow-up questions about stoicism? Have you had moments in your life when you were able to muster your inner stoic and moments you could not? If you'd be comfortable sharing your thoughts, comments, and questions with a Hidden Brain audience, please record a voice memo on your phone and email it to us at [email protected]. Use the subject line "Stoicism."

• 40:34Shankar Vedantam?

  The Roman leader Marcus Aurelius lived through turbulent times. Still, he found ways to attend to his inner world. Indeed, he argued that it is only by attending to our inner worlds that our outer worlds can begin to make sense. Massimo Pigliucci is a philosopher at the City College of New York. He is the author of How to be a Stoic: Using Ancient Philosophy to Live a Modern Life. He's also the co-author, with Gregory Lopez and Meredith Alexander Koons, of Beyond Stoicism: A Guide to the Good Life with Stoics, Skeptics, Epicureans, and Other Ancient Philosophers. Massimo, before you started studying Stoicism,

• 41:19Shankar Vedantam?

  you often found your emotions spinning out of control. I understand a pet peeve of yours was the issue of people pulling out their phones in the middle of a movie or a show?

• 41:30Speaker 01

  Yes, you have no idea how many times I got upset about that. Because to me, this was inconceivable. I would say to myself, how is this guy possibly not aware of the fact that in the middle of the movie, he's raising his phone? And now everybody behind him is looking at his phone instead of the movie. It's getting... How rude! How could you be so inconsiderate about that sort of stuff? And then that would, of course, ruin my whole experience at the movies. Because, you know, what are you going to do about it? I mean, sometimes I did go and confront the person, usually fairly nicely. And I got all sorts of responses, from the occasional polite, "Oh, I'm sorry, I didn't realize it,"

• 42:11Speaker 01

  to some funny people, you know, telling me off and reacting in a very angry fashion. I have a right to, you know, do whatever they want with my phone. It's like, no, you don't. You're not at home. You're not in your home. You don't have a right. So sometimes those things would escalate, not to the point of, you know, physical violence, but certainly of raised voices or, you know, storming off and calling the manager of the movie theater, who usually is impossible to find for whatever reason. And so, so there was a number of times when this happened. And of course, this is a minor thing, right? I mean, you, you, you could reasonably argue, look, man, there's a lot more important things to get upset about. But it was not just the fact in itself.

• 42:50Speaker 01

  It was the, the inconceivability that somebody would be so clueless or so inconsiderate to, to actually do that kind of thing.

• 42:59Shankar Vedantam?

  And Or, or someone playing music loudly on the subway was another.

• 43:03Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah. You know, there are, there, there are some people apparently who have not realized that we invented these wonderful things called earbuds. You can put them in your, your ear and not bother anybody. And I, I thought often, you know, when I get, when I used to get upset about the subway experience, I thought, maybe one of these days I just have to come into the subway with a very large boombox. And as soon as I hear somebody doing that, turn my own at the highest possible volume to show him what it's gonna happen. You know, it's as a teaching lesson, not as, not as a, in a vindictive way, but as a teaching lesson. You see what hap, what would happen if everybody were doing that? I never, I never actually did it, but it, it's been in the back of my mind for, for a while.

• 43:50Speaker 01

  Marcus says, why do you expect people to be different from what they are? That's insane. That's, that's just crazy. You know that people are in a certain way. There's a, there's a place in the meditation when he says, um, you know, remember when you get up in the morning and you get out of the, of the door, remind yourself that you will encounter all sorts of inconsiderate people who will do all sorts of things that you don't like. This is just a fact of life. Now, you can deal with the situation. In some cases, you can correct them. I don't, I don't want to give the impression that, you know, that Stoicism is about just lay back and taking it, right? This is called the, the danger of doormatism, of, of turning yourself into a doormat so that everybody walks all over you. That's not the, the point.

• 44:34Speaker 01

  Marco says explicitly, there are two things you can do when somebody is behaving in a way that you disapprove of. One is to teach them, to explain to them, you know, look, this is problematic because. And then failing that, you can bear with them. You can, you can use your ability to, your patience, your ability to withstand things as a, as a result. Because what else are you gonna do? Right? Those are pretty much your, your two, your two options. So you just have to, it, it's not that the two are incompatible. Of course, you're gonna argue and you're gonna try to do things in order to improve the situation. But if that fails, then you have to accept that, okay, this time, reality didn't go my way. Too bad.

• 45:27Shankar Vedantam?

  So he says, in, in one of the passages, "The cucumber is bitter, toss it away. There are briars in the path, turn aside. That is enough. You don't need to add, why are such things found in the world? For you would be a laughingstock to any student of nature, just as you would be laughed at by a carpenter and a cobbler if you took them to task, because in their shops are seen sawdust and pairings from what they are making."

• 45:51Speaker 01

  Yep. Exactly. So he's saying, look, there are certain things that inevitably have certain consequences. Right? If you are in the business of working wood, well, there's, there's gonna be sawdust. Doesn't, you know, so you cannot complain, you cannot reasonably complain. You could complain, but it's not reasonable to complain about all the dust in the shop, because that's an inevitable byproduct of the fact that you're working wood. And so similarly, to complain about the fact that some people behave irrationally or inconsiderately or rudely, or whatever it is, under certain circumstances, it's like, what? Have you never met human beings before? It's, don't you know that this is the way it works? Which incidentally doesn't mean that people always do that, right? That's or that they're incorrigible.

• 46:36Speaker 01

  So that's why Marcus says you go out and teach them, talk to them, right? If something bothers you, instead of getting upset and complaining about the world, just do something about it, right? In another bit of the Meditions, he also says, you know, remember that it's really impious to not to do, not to act on behalf, you know, justly and try to correct injustice. So this isn't about not doing anything. It's about a more realistic approach to reality. And a less self-centered approach. Because in a sense, right? If you complain about the cucumbers and the briars and all that sort of stuff, this is a very self-centered view of reality. You want the world to always accommodate to your wishes and to your preferences.

• 47:21Speaker 01

  But that's insane. That's an extreme degree of narcissism, which is not healthy, right?

• 47:28Shankar Vedantam?

  So you recently had an occasion to practice what Marcus Aurelius preached in the face of an adverse event. Tell me the story of what happened when you were headed to a subway train in Rome.

• 47:47Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah. So the situation was I was supposed to meet my brother in Rome. And, you know, Rome is the city where I grew up, so I'm very comfortable navigating everything, including the subway system. So I got on the subway and suddenly I feel this guy running in front of me at the, near the entrance, it's kind of pushing back very, very hard, as if the subway were overcrowded. And, you know, it's like, but it wasn't overcrowded. I mean, there was a little bit of, of, you know, people, but not, it wasn't to justify, not enough to justify that kind of behavior. So the first thought was, why is, what is this guy doing? And before I realized what in fact he was doing, it had already happened.

• 48:29Speaker 01

  This, this guy had a friend, an associate behind me, who, while I was distracted with the physical pressure of the other one pushing back on me, just picked my pocket, right? So the wallet was gone. And by the time I realized that that's what was going to happen, it took a fraction of a second, but it was too late. Already the two were out of the subway, the doors were closing, and that's it. I was all of a sudden without a wallet. Now, if this happened years ago, I would have been really upset.

• 49:00Speaker 01

  I would have been angry, both in myself for being so stupid. It's like, you know, I grew up in this city. I know that these things happen. This is a, I was in a particularly touristy area of Rome. So of course these things happen, you know, why, again, briars and cucumbers, right? Why, why would you expect not, that not to happen? Um, I was angry and myself, I was angry at those two people. It's like, how dare they, you know, violate my person and my, my, my property and so on. So I, it, it would have been a normal reaction, be upset, to be angry, uh, to be dejected afterwards. Once you realize what, you know, the consequences, then action, et cetera, et cetera. And to my surprise, instead, the first thing that came up to my mind was,

• 49:45Speaker 01

  what here is up to you and what is not up to you? It's like, ah, thank you, Marcus. So here's, here's the thing. I sat down, I put out my phone. Fortunately, they did not get my, my phone, my smartphone. Unfortunately, the Rome subway has wifi everywhere, including in tunnels. So the phone was working perfectly. So what did I do? I thought about it for a second. It's like, okay, make, let's make a list here. I immediately contacted via app, the credit card companies, blocked the credit cards. I contacted the DMV and immediately asked for a replacement driver license. Which, by the way, they, they sent immediately, like a few days later it was in the mail.

• 50:27Speaker 01

  And they, they immediately allowed me to download a PDF that functioned as a, as a temporary driver license. I, I'm saying this because Americans often complain so much about the DMV. It's like, it's the, it's usually the, you know, quintessential example of everything that is wrong with bureaucracy. I don't know what they're talking about. It was very good. So I did that. Then I thought, okay, how much cash did I have there? Well, less than a hundred dollars. Okay. Fortunately for me, I can absorb that kind of loss without really much of a, of a, of an impact. Is there anything else that is left to be done? No. So I sat down, I opened, I switched to a different app. I started reading a book. And a few stops later, I got off and I met my brother.

• 51:12Speaker 01

  Now, I told him what happened and my brother, of course, said, well, I'm sad. I don't see you upset. What, what, what's going on here? You don't, you don't seem to be particularly, uh, you know, bothered by this thing. And I said, would it help?

• 51:27Speaker 01

  I solved what I could. I took care immediately of what I could. And I told him, guess what? Now dinner is on you because I have no money.

• 51:41Speaker 01

  It worked.

• 52:00Shankar Vedantam?

  The philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre once said, "Hell is other people." In our companion story to this episode, available exclusively to subscribers to Hidden Brain Plus, we explore ideas from Marcus Aurelius and the Stoics about how we can best manage our relationships with others. It's titled "U2.0: How to Survive Other People."

• 52:23Shankar Vedantam?

  If you're not yet a subscriber, please visit support.hidenbrain.org. If you're using an Apple device, you can go to apple.co/hidenbrain. You can get a free seven-day trial in both places. You'll instantly have access to all our subscriber-only content. Again, that's support.hidenbrain.org or apple.co/hidenbrain.

• 52:50Shankar Vedantam?

  Massimo Pigliucci is a philosopher at the City College of New York. He's the author of How to Be a Stoic: Using Ancient Philosophy to Live a Modern Life. He's also the co-author, with Gregory Lopez and Meredith Alexander-Kunz, of Beyond Stoicism: A Guide to the Good Life with Stoics, Skeptics, Epicureans, and Other Ancient Philosophers. Massimo, thank you so much for joining me today on Hidden Brain. It was a pleasure. Thanks for having me.

• 53:21Shankar Vedantam?

  Do you have follow-up questions and ideas about Stoicism? If you'd be comfortable sharing your thoughts, comments, and questions with a Hidden Brain audience, please record a voice memo on your phone and email it to us at [email protected]. Use the subject line "Stoicism." That email address again is [email protected]. Hidden Brain is produced by Hidden Brain Media. Our audio production team includes Annie Murphy-Paul, Kristin Wong, Laura Kwerel, Ryan Katz, Autumn Barnes, Andrew Chadwick, and Nick Woodbury. Tara Boyle is our executive producer. I'm Hidden Brain's executive editor.

• 54:05Shankar Vedantam?

  Our unsung hero this week is Logan Snyder of HasOptimisation, a firm that does web design, development, and maintenance, as well as digital marketing. We recently started working with Logan and the HasOptimisation team, and they've made the work of maintaining hiddenbrain.org so much easier. If you need help running your website, check them out at hasopt.com. That's H-A-S-O-P-T dot com. Thank you, Logan. If you're enjoying the episodes in our U2.0 series, please share them with two or three people in your life. You can find all the episodes in the series on your preferred podcast platform or at

• 54:47Shankar Vedantam?

  hiddenbrain.org. I'm Shankar Vedantam. See you soon.

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